The Cli-Fi Report is a portal for all things cli-fi, a subgenre of speculative fiction, with new links from blogs to videos to Wikipedia to Twitter to news links and Facebook Groups. See the portal, the largest Cli-Fi portal on the Internet at cli-fi.net / MEDIA inquiries at: danbloom@gmail.com

The monthly column launched on February 7, 2017 and has had six iterations ﻿so far, with more to come.

In the first column, ﻿Brady, a versatile and graceful columnist, set the tone for readers, writing: "Burning Worlds" is a new monthly column dedicated to examining important trends in climate change fiction, or "cli-fi."

"It astonishes to think just how long humans have known that the Earth is getting warmer," Brady noted in her introduction, adding: "The term "global warming" didn’t enter public consciousness until the 1970s, but scientists have studied our planet’s natural greenhouse effect since at least the 1820s. In 1896, a Swedish chemist named SvanteArrheniussome concluded that human activity (like coal burning) contributed to the effect, warming the planet further.

"And yet, here we find ourselves in 2017, still wrestling with manmade climate change like it's a new phenomenon. Why have we not acted sooner? The answer may lie in what [Brooklyn] author AmitavGhosh calls humanity’s ''great derangement": our inability to perceive the enormity of the catastrophe that awaits us.

"That's where fiction writers come in," Brady said.

"For years, authors have been writing 'climate change fiction', or 'cli-fi,' a genre of literature that imagines the past, present, and future effects of climate change. Their work crosses literary boundaries in terms of style and content, landing on shelves marked sci-fi and literary fiction.
"Perhaps you’ve read one of the classics: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain.

Then there’s Ian McEwan’s Solar and J. G. Ballard’s 1965 novel The Burning World, from which this column derives its name. Each of these novels -- like others in the genre -- help us to "see" possible futures lived out on a burning, drowning, or dying planet.

Here at the Review, we feel it's time to give cli-fi more attention. To that end, we bring you "Burning Worlds," a new monthly column dedicated to examining what’s hot (sorry) in cli-fi. It'll feature interviews, reviews, and analyses of the genre with the hope of generating a larger conversation about climate change and why imagined depictions of the phenomenon are vital to the literary community -- and beyond."

Amy Brady is Senior Editor of the Chicago Review of Books and Deputy Publisher of Guernica Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter at @ingredient_x